The Trump campaign said it was confident the president was on course for victory even as the outcome of Tuesday’s election was too close to call, with millions more votes still to be counted.
Officials said they were confident that Arizona, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada, and Georgia would all fall to President Trump and that they were preparing for legal action.
“We are confident on our pathway. We are confident on our math,” said campaign manager Bill Stepien on a conference call with reporters, before he accused opponents of wanting to count ineligible ballots.
“We know the Democrats are pushing to count late ballots,” he said. “Why are they pushing to count late ballots? Because we know and they know if we count all legal ballots, we win, the president wins.”
Trump received an early boost on Tuesday night by holding Florida. The result was a surge in confidence that culminated in the president appearing at the White House to accuse opponents of fraud and to claim the race was as good as won.
However, the Biden campaign gained ground overnight.
With the result too close to call, both sides held conference calls to press their advantage amid preparations for disputed results.
“We are obviously leading a full-court press to make sure that we have our legal teams that are in place,” said senior Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller. “We want to make sure that all legally casts are counted. We also want to make sure that illegally cast ballots are not counted.”
Officials ran through their position in each state.
The tallies in Wisconsin, said Stepien, differed by only 1 percentage point, putting it in recount territory.
In Michigan, he said votes to be counted included heavily Republican counties; in Nevada, the final Republican winning margin would be 5,500 votes.
With more than a million votes to be counted in Pennsylvania, Stepien said that even if only 30% were for the president, he would win by 40,000.
Trump officials are particularly furious that news networks called the race in Arizona for Biden on Tuesday night with incomplete results, including absentee votes cast close to Election Day.
Stepien said data showed more than two-thirds of the votes would come to the president, handing him the state by 30,000 votes.
Miller added: “We think anyone who has called this race is just plain wrong.”
